Confronting Ethical Emptiness on Wall Street

Earlier this month Greg Smith, an executive director at Goldman Sachs, quit his job in a high-profile way: he announced his resignation in a scathing op-ed piece published in that day's New York Times. The article denounced Goldman for extensive ethical failures. By his own admission, he knew of nothing Goldman had done that broke the law; instead, he accused the company of maintaining an organizational culture of legal-but-unethical behavior.

Culture of Service

Smith writes that when he joined Goldman 12 years ago, he experienced an organizational culture focused on earning the company's success by delivering good service to the customer:

It might sound surprising to a skeptical public, but culture was always a vital part of Goldman Sachs's success. It revolved around teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients. The culture was the secret sauce that made this place great and allowed us to earn our clients' trust for 143 years. It wasn't just about making money; this alone will not sustain a firm for so long. It had something to do with pride and belief in the organization.

That culture was sustained, Smith writes, because the company's leadership modeled the right behavior, signaled to subordinates that it was expected, and rewarded it when they saw it.

Goldman had a transition in leadership in 2006. Smith alleges that the new leaders model, teach, and reward a different kind of behavior. As a result, Smith says, a new organizational culture has emerged:

I attend derivatives sales meetings where not one single minute is spent asking questions about how we can help clients. It's purely about how we can make the most possible money off of them. . . . It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off.

I have no idea whether Smith's allegations are true. But the lessons we ought to learn from this moment apply regardless of whether Smith's claims are true or false, because you can learn them from watching the way so many people responded to the claims.

The Times article caused an instant uproar on Wall Street and in the financial press. The reaction mostly shows that America's financial sector has a strictly legalistic understanding of ethics. If no laws were broken, what's the problem?

A Forbes columnist sneered that Smith was just having a “midlife crisis.” It's immature whining to expect that companies should strive to serve their customers.

If what Smith is saying today is true, then the biggest problem remains . . . the investors that Smith claims continue to buy garbage from Goldman. Until those clients start to take responsibility for themselves, Goldman will remain incentivized to sell stuff to them. One of the root causes of the mortgage nightmare, the CDO disaster, Madoff, and Stanford, was investor gullibility. . . . If those investors are not already entering into Goldman deals carefully now, they never will.

Even my favorite business columnist, the Wall Street Journal's Holman Jenkins, took a similar line: “If there's a case for outlawing parties voluntarily engaging in complex financial transactions, then let's hear it. Otherwise Mr. Smith's Goldman vilification is just the standard Wall Street vilification focused unjustly on a single name.” The Journal editors caught Jenkins's tone very well in the headline they chose for his piece: “Greg Smith Is Too Sexy for His Cat.”

Letter of the Law

All this boils down to a claim that ethical behavior consists solely of following the letter of the law. It's okay to rip people off—-intentionally selling them financial products that are disadvantageous for them to buy—-so long as you don't break any laws doing it.

That's an empty, materialistic view of life. Contra Jenkins's assumptions, I have no desire to pass a law ordering companies to maintain healthy ethical cultures. The whole point here is that law is not the only aspect of ethics. If we teach people to follow the rules, but we also teach them to take satisfaction in gaming the system for their own benefit, we've fallen short. The only way to avoid reductive materialism is to teach people to find their sense of satisfaction in earning success by doing work that makes the world better.

Materialism is not only evil, it's also impractical. One of the most important findings of social science in the past decade has been that you can't sustain either an economy or a society in a no-trust environment where people expect that those around them will obey the letter of the law but otherwise behave as ravenous egoists. Economies shut down and social conflicts become uncontainable.

Jenkins rightly points out that Goldman's clients are all big, grown-up, sophisticated investors. They are aware Goldman may not have their interests at heart but find it advantageous to do business with them anyway. But over the long term, that's insufficient. Both our moral integrity and the flourishing of our economy and civilization require us to set the bar higher.

I'm not naïve. Goldman has become a less attractive place to work since the meltdown, and it's pretty clear that Smith enjoys the limelight. So I have no doubt he hopes his actions will help him transition to an even better job somewhere else. But we don't have to lionize Smith to be worried about the ethical emptiness that the response to his article clearly reveals.

Greg Forster (PhD, Yale University) is the editor of Hang Together and the author of six books, including Joy for the World. His scholarly and popular writing covers theology, economics, political philosophy, and education policy.

Comments:

Greg Forster (PhD, Yale University) is the editor of Hang Together and the author of six books, including Joy for the World. His scholarly and popular writing covers theology, economics, political philosophy, and education policy.

Greg Forster's Books

sponsors

Info

The Gospel Coalition is a fellowship of evangelical churches deeply committed to renewing our faith in the gospel of Christ and to reforming our ministry practices to conform fully to the Scriptures. We yearn to work with all who, in addition to embracing our confession and theological vision for ministry, seek the lordship of Christ over the whole of life with unabashed hope in the power of the Holy Spirit to transform individuals, communities, and cultures.